Embers
by Penrose Quinn
Summary: He lights up a cigarette and it's a loaded gun on his mouth. [Leorio learns of Kurapika's smoking habits.]


Dark Continent arc. AU. Blue-eyed Kurapika. Leopika.

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The night is alive anywhere, _anywhere_ , but where he's at.

Kurapika's a portrait painted in cyan blues and magentas, washed-out, spent in a somber suit; blue and black like his eyes, the manner they glint alight that nostalgic blue—a warm blue, like bright skies with only but the promise of tomorrow, just, you know, _him_ —and darken in an interval because he must be wearing those contacts again, or maybe it's because of the flickering neon-lights. Whatever it was, Leorio just didn't like the dead black in his eyes, the way they vaguely remind him of coal, and beneath them, barely sparking red like embers that spite and burn whatever they touch.

That's not Kurapika. Leorio knows it.

Kurapika is in that shadowy corner in the alleyway, skulking from a world where he's far more deserving of the spotlight and the eight feet wide spread posters behind glass walls and glamor. Leorio's almost eager to shout that they don't know what they're missing. That _he_ should really be looking at him right now than the fading graffiti and crumpled newspapers on the pavement.

Leorio thinks he's going a little overboard. Med school can do shit like this to him, sometimes. Has it really been that long since he last saw him?

Leorio comes at him in his casual strut, hands in pockets. "I've been calling you for hours."

Kurapika doesn't flinch, doesn't speak. He isn't even sparing him a glance. It's that nonchalance that's thinning whatever patience Leorio has reserved.

Crossing his arms, Leorio stands next to him. "Answer your phone, at least," he says, annoyed, and from lack of response, he's seething, ready to yell at him from the top of his lungs for being such an asshole though Leorio doesn't do it and he doesn't understand what's making him waver. There's this unusual darkness around Kurapika today that's been looming, poisoning, that's thicker than asphalt smoke and miasma, and Leorio can't help but think has it always been like that? When they've been together inside the headquarters, has it always been like that? Like that time in Yorknew.

So alone. Isolated. The not now, not ever.

Leorio grumbles under his breath until he surrenders to a sigh. However his grudge against the phone hasn't passed, not in a long shot. "An apology would be appreciated," Leorio's that stupidly stubborn and that's just how he copes with these matters, he knows, but shit, he should have asked about his wellbeing first. _How's he been, has he been sleeping lately, why can't he just give him a call?_ Just the mundane questions, the simple ones. The same ones he's going to nag out, even if his friend ignores them for the whole evening.

Because Kurapika isn't looking like himself these days, and Leorio's half tempted to take him out tomorrow for his own sake, get some little sunshine, talk about their old misadventures—hell, he'll be willing to pay for drinks if he has to. The other half, just to stay, just to wait, even if he's impatient, and he wants to bawl out, and sometimes, maybe just smack some sense to him.

It was Kurapika's turn to sigh. It was just a sigh, a token of mint and resignation, but it was familiar, some vestige of himself that's still _there_ , that's still Kurapika, beneath the suit and tie, black contacts, and cold, cold insularity. God, Leorio does miss him. More than what he realizes.

"You'd want that, wouldn't you?" Kurapika replies finally and takes a packet from his breast pocket, pulling out a cigarette stick.

In his mortification, Leorio forgets his temper and exclaims, "You _smoke_?"

Their eyes meet for a heartbeat, and it's like looking at him for a millennia. Kurapika gives him a faint wisp of a smile. "Now you know," he says with a cigarette in his lips as he fiddles with a lighter, glaring intently on the flames licking at the butt end. Scarlet against black and blue, like fire and cinder. "It calms me down a bit."

Leorio isn't a smoker, isn't a fan of the smell of tobacco. In his childhood, it has had its charm when adults have gathered together to the cigar shop, rushing out to a bleak corner with crazy-cheap cigarettes; there's a sense of patent maturity when you hold one, a sweet sort of reprieve and reverence through the smoke rings. That's before he's inhaled the actual stuff, when the nicotine sears in his lungs and he finds himself asphyxiating till there's a sting of tears in his eyes. The smell is cancerous, literally and figuratively.

Kurapika's breathes out nicotine, diaphanous smoke sifting past his lips and circling around his pale neck like an imitation noose, and then breathes in the toxin that should make his insides writhe and parch and rot. It still burns him inside, doesn't it?

Leorio will have decried him to stop, but for now, just this time, he doesn't mention it. There are these ashes in his tired eyes, and just at the irises, sparks of crimson ignited by smoke ghosts. Smoke ghosts that should have been forgotten years ago. Kurapika's calm now—or it's because he thinks he is. That this is okay. That staining his lungs black is _okay_ than letting the cloud specters haunt him.

He lights up a cigarette and it's a loaded gun on his mouth. Silver in his bloodstream and pollution underneath.

Leorio exhales a breath, tamping the urge to throw that coffin nail on the ground. "When did you start?" he asks congenially (as much as possible, respectfully) but all he's mulling about is the pungent fumes in the air, so bitter, so mordant, that it's almost tangible and he can taste it from his tongue. That, and Kurapika's contracting chest, and how he's managed to not smell like burned-out cigarettes because it's going to cling on his pressed suit, on his soul.

Kurapika shrugs like it's nothing serious. That he's not wasting away, burning inside like the charred tobacco in his lips.

"Can't believe you tolerate this stuff. You don't seem like the type," Leorio remarks, and really, someone as self-righteous and self-preserved as Kurapika won't even bother for a cigarette. Not even for the heck of it. That's until now.

Leorio's tensing over again. Nerves, maybe. But he's afraid at that moment, afraid because he doesn't know what he should do and all he can do is console him out of it, ease him a little better than the taste of nicotine, because as Kurapika puffs out a screen of white fog, he appears likes he's fading—once again, so distant in his limbo, yet so close to home, if he can only just look forward. _We're here, too, you know. We're_ always _here._

Leorio's hand falters at midway from touching his shoulder, and instead, he utters gravely, concernedly: "Hey, Kurapika,"

— _don't overdo it._

Kurapika takes another long drag, blows out mists of nightshade blue that speak in volumes. It's that stagnant gaze in his eyes that makes Leorio slightly tremble, slightly weak, and he's standing rim-rod straight now because he has to, a test of wills. He's standing for him.

"I rarely smoke," Kurapika answers the untold admonition from the hitch of Leorio's breath. In those fleeting seconds, Leorio hates him for knowing the right thing to say because Kurapika's always been good at that, and hiding just enough sincerity, emotion, to not compromise him. "I just needed one right now."

 _That's good._ But still. Pushing up his glasses, Leorio sighs softly. "For a minute there, I thought I'd have to call you a _chain_ -smoker," a slow grin perks up his face, "get it?"

Kurapika may have sent him a tolerant look and rolled his eyes, but it's that eventual snort that blips the life back on his lips.

Just before Leorio attempts for his cue of bad jokes and causerie, the young pillar of a man next to him crumbles down from the gravity into coughing fits and debris. The sputtering echoes the alleyway like that of cracking walls, shattering of fine glass, that rings sirens to Leorio and makes its blare loud and clear from the eardrum of his heart. Kurapika's bent, breaking, with a hand to his mouth that's been drinking poison for far too long, and the other hand to his cigarette—the bane of him—clutching to it still, clutching _hard_.

A lean, a pat to his back, and a couple quiet intimate seconds of silence; Leorio's holding him from the fall. It's only been minutes since Kurapika has begun smoking, and when his packet drops from his breast pocket—then it hits him. On the ground, the packet is freshly bought, almost unused from the many cigarette sticks left inside, all waiting to burn and kill.

Leorio grips on his shoulder, arriving to a conclusion. "You're just new at this?" he utters aloud, and asks mildly, "hey, are you okay?"

The fisted hand on his mouth is shaking, stifled gasps swirling past his knuckles. Eventually, Kurapika sags against the wall as if an invisible hand is strangling him on that spot and he doesn't mind it crushing his windpipe. Then he hoarsely mutters: "I . . . I'm fine."

Leorio frowns. _You're not fine, you idiot._

With heavy-lidded eyes and a winded sigh, Kurapika's a crumpled mirage in smog and gaslight dreams—and god, Leorio knows it's not the right time for it, but he's beautiful. Beautiful even if he's sunken neck-deep from the guilt and corruption that's devouring him alive. However the hinges remain, a repercussion that spin him like spokes of a wheel—all that wrath, revenge, loneliness—it's going to be the end of him one day.

Despite all of that; and the fire and brimstone in his eyes, the noxious smoke that consume them both, and this shipwreck of a reunion, Leorio reaches out for him—reaches and reaches until he can feel the blood pulse on his palms, feel the human beneath the man-made-monster. Because he knows it's not too late, that he's always been _him_ albeit living through hell, and Leorio's still reaching—

His hand clasps firmly on a delicate wrist. And finally, _finally_ , the damn cigarette slips from those pale fingers. "I think you should go home, Kurapika," Leorio graces him a meaningful look and Kurapika meets him halfway with glazed eyes, bleeding between blue and black. Something halts him for awhile from the words, transfixed, lost. "Get some rest. Take a shower," and then he sighs, "just no cigarettes for now."

His head bobs, slowly, wordlessly. As Kurapika leans further back, he sucks in the cold evening air through his teeth as if he's breathing for the first time and the last. The street cars race past them in flashes of hot red lights, the old water pipes rattle, and the clacker of heels dully brattles the world—but Leorio doesn't care because in this tiny untouched crevice in the universe, it's just him and Kurapika.

"You're a mess," and like a promise, Leorio means what he says: "I'll help you on your way."

"Just a minute longer," Kurapika drones on. "Just . . ."

"I know."

"Leorio,"

"I'll wait."

Until the ashen storm leaves, and the skies clear for tomorrow. He'll get him home.

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 **Disclaimer: I don't own Hunter X Hunter.**


End file.
